Seventy-five years is a vast time, but also a moment. There are still elderly people who remember that day perfectly, the sky turning to ink, the strong wind, the terrible storm over the city. As if the lid of the world had suddenly closed again. There are people who have never forgotten. The Superga disaster was like one of those flashes of lightning between the blanket of clouds towards the hill, a flash of news that filled the city with dismay. The rumor spread in an instant, even though at that time only radio and newspapers existed. It was an incredible and very fast word of mouth: «Toro is dead!»
The people, incredulous and dismayed, said exactly that, as if the Bull were a human creature, a person and not a football team. The Bull is dead. The witnesses who can still remember describe the following hours and days as an estrangement from reality, almost more than a nightmare: a floating elsewhere, in the lands of the impossible.
The silence together with the crying, the condolence, then the enormous popular participation in the funeral, the coffins in the city procession, the mass in the Cathedral, the impossible farewell. And the events of the days to come: the scudetto assigned to the memory, even if the season was not yet over, that tricolor sewn on the shirts of the boys who would take to the field wearing the uniforms of the fallen. An emotional and historical event of incomparable importance.
Everyone in this city, including the Juventus fans, felt like orphans. Everyone had lost a father, a son, a brother in some way. She told it well Giampiero Boniperti, Juventus symbol who was a friend of many of those legendary Granata players: Toro and Juve no longer existed, in those moments, but a single endless suffering, said Boniperti.
The tragedy of Superga, 4 May 1949, with the grenade plane crashing into the wall of the basilica, returning from a short trip to Lisbon, killed players, managers, journalists and crew members. It was Vittorio Pozzo’s turn to climb the hill first to recognize the poor remains.
At that moment, an endless loneliness began for the families of the dead, and the belief was strengthened among all football fans that destiny not only exists, but knows how to attack someone in particular. Unfortunately, the Granata story would have confirmed this perception, with other days of tragic mourning: such as the death of Gigi Meronihit by a car in the city center, like the stroke he took away Giorgio Ferrini, historic captain. Yet, precisely this tragic and at the same time glorious feeling, this almost romantic vocation of the Bull and of being grenade, has marked the difference over time between Torino and the rest of the world.
Even the 1976 scudetto, the first and only after Superga, won by the formidable team of Pulici and Graziani, coached by Gigi Radice, had this unparalleled depth: something that has to do with history, not just football. Something capable of going far beyond victories and defeats: wings that fly in another sky.
Here because Republic decided to tell and celebrate that particular day, and that time that never passes. The book you have in your hands is one of those that remain, because it tells a timeless story. He tells it above all to those who were not there, that is, to the youngest readers, because the greatness of sport is also a shared memory: it is the root of the oak.
In this volume you can read the words written by the great historical authors of our newspaper, starting with the masters Gianni Brera, Giorgio Bocca, Gianni Mura and Mario Fossati. Their words are the tight knot between the ages and the present. But there is also more in the volume. There are trips down memory lane, like the one in Cassano d’Adda on the trail of the legendary Valentino Mazzolaand there is the moving testimony of his son Sandro, the one who with the Inter and national team shirt would become one of the greatest post-war champions, one of the heroes of the unforgettable Mexican World Cup of ’70: Italy-Germany 4- 3, and then Pele.
We asked Eraldo Pecci to tell us what the legendary Superga granata were for the athletes who won the scudetto twenty-seven years later: among them there was also Pecci, naturally, and his words (as a true writer, not just as a stadium champion) are a testimony new and profound. Since the Superga tragedy is also a narrative, we asked the writer Dario Voltolini a fictional story about May 4, 1949, which is also the title of his work.
In our book there is the chronicle of that tragedy, alongside the human significance that the event represented for Turin and for the whole of Italy. We remembered who those formidable champions were, starting with captain Mazzola or the memorable left back Virgilio Marosoa full-back capable of attacking like others would be born.
Finally, we asked ourselves what remains of the spirit of Grande Torino in Toro and in today’s football: not a sterile exercise in nostalgia, but a comparison between eras to continue to enhance what really matters: tradition, the profound essence and the feeling for a team different from all the others.
